Alnoor Ladha
Co-founder, Executive Director - The Rules (www.therules.org)
Founding Partner - Purpose (www.purpose.com) Board
Member - Greenpeace USA (www.greenpeace.org) Alnoor's
work focuses on the intersection of political
organizing, storytelling and technology. He is a
founding member and the Executive Director of /The Rules
(/TR), a global network of activists, organizers,
designers, coders, researchers, writers and others

On Beginnings

They say it takes a certain type of personality to be a radical.

Questioning of the status
quo, anti-authoritarian, angry perhaps, undoubtedly rebellious,
critical rather than accepting of what is. Complex analyses and
algorithms are deployed to compare shared psychological traits,
relationships to authority figures, level of socio-economic
privilege, and even birth order.

If any of this
attributive, long-form speculation is correct, I may be more of an
anomaly than my grade school report cards alluded.

I started my career under the same veils and presumptions as most
youth growing up in a Western, capitalist state - seduced by
rationalism, consumption, growth, and competition.

I wanted to be a lawyer
or some such technocratic, middling career that would satisfy my
immigrant parents' desire for white acceptance and simultaneously
uphold the logic of the system that put the whole house of cards
together.

I grew up in a poor part
of the relatively affluent city of Vancouver, Canada. I maintained
mediocrity with the occasional hints of rebelliousness that would be
produced in any sentient being living in the Canadian suburbs.

It was not my love for Trotsky or Proudhon or Sankara that
radicalized me.

Even if I had read
fragments, I couldn't fully understand them in my state of
pre-consciousness. It was, in fact, the influence of my mother's
spiritual values that seeded my initial morality. The influence of
her brand of Sufism, the mystical branch of Islam, self-cultivated
within me, even though I explicitly rejected Islam from a young age.

I started to adopt some
of its principles as the basis for my own spiritual journey, both
rejecting and accepting its tenets at my discretion, while
incorporating other modalities including Buddhism, Taosim, Ayurveda,
and Shamanism.

As I progressed on my journey, those initial seeds blossomed within
me as a reaction to the total disgust I felt for a world that lacked
empathy, compassion, and signs of progression to a higher plane.

After all, every religion
especially the esoteric traditions are, at their core, a moral
philosophy.

The illusion of reason
and the animalistic drive for self-interest that are the main
features of late-stage capitalism challenged my spiritual values.

How could I
continue to legitimize the structures of this world while
holding true to my spiritual ideals?

How could I
subtly regurgitate the premises of Cartesian dualism when I
knew they had no model to explain the torment and anguish
and heartache that existed all around me?

This tension awakened my
political sensibilities.

I started to understand
that one's politics are simply their morality put into action. I
could no longer not act.

Regardless of my awakenings, I never attributed my identity to the
coming together of these two modes of being.

I did not self-select
into the dual camp of the mystical anarchist, both in the hopes of
maintaining my political friends who would be embarrassed by such a
'new age' sentiment and my spiritual community that would see me as
divisive, judgmental, and living in 'non-acceptance.'

As I kept these identities separate, I found that my central quest -
to help create an emancipatory political and economic system, to
create the better world we know is possible - was also suffering
from the central schism in my life.

Despite what my Leftist
sensibilities tell me, I know that simply changing the rules of the
economic and political system will not be enough.

And despite my spiritual
disposition and what many 'spiritual gurus' propose, I do not
believe that shifts in our individual consciousness, even at mass
scale, will change the outcomes of our material reality in the
absence of a superstructural overhaul that more closely resembles
revolution than reform.

So what then
shall we do?

What must be
done?

And most
importantly, what should we believe in?

On Anarchism

At its core, anarchism states that creativity and self-organization
will always lead to better societal arrangements than the arbitrary
commands of disconnected technocrats.

Concentrating power at
the top of the pyramid will unequivocally lead to the capture of the
democratic process and a tyranny of plutocratic rule.

We cannot deny that there is a metaphysical and moral code deeply
embedded within all political philosophy, but one that can never be
expressed without the admonition of rationalist judgment.

The highest values in
anarchism are the simultaneous upholding of freedom and equality.
The traditional Right values freedom over all else (e.g., they
champion property rights and fight against redistributive taxes), or
at least they value the rhetoric of freedom. 1

And the traditional Left
values equality over freedom (e.g., they are willing to bear the
costs of societal levelers and safety nets such as healthcare,
welfare, etc. at the expense of some personal freedom).

But for anarchists, both
of these conditions must apply.

True freedom is equality
of choice and equality of opportunity for everyone to thrive in his
or her own way. It has nothing to do with private property or
ownership per se.

If we can decide on our
own arrangements for how to live, the majority of us will not be
subjected to the greed and wealth extraction of a tiny elite and,
therefore, will not need to reduce our freedom or equality to
compensate for this.

This fundamental belief
in the dignity of the human soul, the desire for collective
liberation, the intuitive understanding of a shared consciousness,
and the faith in a human creativity greater than any one individual
are in many ways all recognitions of a greater 'source' in each of
us.

The other two tenets of anarchism that have spiritual corollaries
are disintermediation and consciousness. Anarchists don't require
the mediation of the state, feudal lords, popes, imams, ayatollahs,
sun gods, or any other arbitrary source of ordained power.

'No gods, no masters' as
the famous dictum goes.

Anarchists also believe
in the conscious individual as the unit of free societies. This
requires sovereign women and men who understand the structure of
power, consent to rules they themselves have legitimized, and
consciously choose to live within their own communities according to
their shared principles and values.

Living as a conscious individual, of course, requires
significant investment of time.

It requires active and
mindful consent. It requires the infrastructure for direct
democracy. None of us ever consented to the way things are in the
current system. We couldn't - not only because it was built and
calcified before we were born, but also because it requires learning
and interest and patience and humility to study the vast power
structures we have today.

Anarchism offers a
relationship to power that is grounded and consensual, which means
power can only be so big and so distant. Power too easily and
rapidly grows out of conceptual and practical reach left to its own
devices.

Anarchism believes in
keeping group power under a shared, transparent, and democratic
'system' rather than putting society under the boot of a small group
of elites and experts.

Both the material and mystical aspects of anarchism lead to the
ontological need to create a world that reflects these political and
spiritual values.

If this is the case,

Why do we never
authentically explicate the spiritual underpinnings of our
political beliefs? 2

After all, aren't
freedom and equality, the disintermediation of power, and
conscious, free individuals also the hopes and aims of most
mystical and esoteric spiritual traditions?

On First
Principles

Wikipedia

Politicos have a tendency to begin or end every debate with some
questions:

what is your
theory of change?

by which they
mean, what is your strategy for achieving some outcome?

and what is the
viable alternative you seek?

by which they
mean, what's the answer?

I have either tiptoed
around these questions or I have gone straight into the bluff.

I have laid out the
play-by-play policy plan that gave them confidence that there is,
indeed, a better way. But these answers are illusory salves. I was
answering the question with the wrong level of consciousness, as
E.F. Schumacher would say.

We are asking questions
on the material realm that, in fact, require spiritual answers.

When someone asks, what should be done in such and such a situation?
the primary question is, in fact, how should we live? The answer
requires both a material and spiritual answer. We must honor the
dimensions of both mind and soul.

But the intellectual life
of modern man has been hijacked by an extreme form of Enlightenment
logic, a deep rational materialism that focuses only on the
observable and measurable at the cost of everything else.

It is a scientism that
believes that if something cannot be measured, it cannot exist.

It tends to ignore most of what we're learning from quantum physics
(and direct experience), including the deep entanglement of the
cosmos, a probabilistic universe of superpositions rather than inert
matter waiting for human exploitation, and the fact that the
'knower' does not stand in a relation of absolute externality to the
natural world being investigated - there is no such exterior
observational point… we are part of the world in its ongoing
intra-activity. 3

Add to these omissions of consciousness the fact that what we even
consider observable has gone through seismic shifts since the
Enlightenment and it leaves one bewildered how we have not
challenged the reductionist barriers to our imagination.

There has been a daylight
hijacking, a coup d'état, of the political agenda of defined
reality.

As Slavoj Žižek
reminds us, ideology is always a background condition - we are
accessing and referencing ideological principles in every act and
utterance whether we recognize it not.

Most of the
superstructures we are subjected to, from our education platforms to
our political systems, from the institution of marriage to who is
considered a societal keeper of knowledge, are relics of a
colonialist, capitalist, rationalist mindset.

If we are to uphold a worldview that reflects our values, we must
answer for ourselves the key questions, the first principles of
philosophy, that we are never incentivized to ask:

Why are we here?
(existentialism)

What is the
ultimate end purpose? (ontology)

What can we truly
know? (epistemology)

What is beauty?
(aesthetics)

How should power
be distributed? (political philosophy)

What is reality?
(metaphysics)

None of the false gods,
including,

religious
institutions

academia

the political
machine

mainstream media,

...and other organs of
the status quo ever address these first principles - although they
offer us illusory answers that we are asked to obey.

They serve as both our
siren and our lullaby. They present us with critical concerns and
then pacify us with their agenda-ridden propaganda.

We become willing
carriers of their pre-programmed memes.

On Mysticism

What is mysticism and why does it elicit such derisive reactions?

For scientific
materialists, the very word signifies an unacceptable negative:

'unknowledge.'

At its simplest level,
mysticism is the belief that our material reality goes beyond the
'observable' phenomena around us.

It recognizes that the
world of three dimensions and five senses is limited to exactly
those confines. We can therefore never truly understand all of the
complexities of the universe with our rational
minds.

This does not mean that mysticism denies science. In fact, the
opposite is true.

As a mystic, I view all
of the world's scientific knowledge as the minimal level of our
understanding - it is the floor of our collective knowledge as
opposed to the ceiling.

Every day, brilliant
scientists from around the world add new observations to our
constantly growing nest of accumulated wisdom.

But as recent findings in
string theory, quantum mechanics, and chaos theory have proven to
us, the more we discover, the more we realize how little
we truly understand.

Mysticism incorporates this willing suspension of disbelief and a
concomitant reverence for mystery and wonder that hardcore
rationalists find unsettling. This need not be the case.

Everything we learn from
the scientific realm further enhances and deepens the magical
aspects of the universe.

Even the atoms we are
made of were forged from hydrogen that exploded long before our
solar system was born. We all have the equivalent of a teaspoon of
stardust inside of us from the Big Bang.

The universe expanded at
the perfect rate from its inception. If it grew 0.01% faster, matter
would never have been able to take form. If it grew 0.01% slower,
the universe would have collapsed on itself. 4

These are just facets of
an incomprehensible, diffractive, and queer reality filled with
majestic mysteries, the bounds of which are beautifully unknowable
to us right now, and perhaps always will be.

So, what does this mean for how we should live our lives?

These thoughts and facts
further our awe for our Cosmos, our biosphere, and our fellow
species. They impel the mystics and the anarchists among us to
create a better world that is commensurate to this unfathomable,
inexplicable, divine experience of the life we each have.

On Capitalism

How can we even begin to organize the better world if we do not
fully understand the current system?

Having a mystical
worldview does not abdicate us from rigor or from politics. Many of
the most spiritually enlightened people I know will say things like,

"I'm not political"
or "Politics creates dualities between good and evil."

Politics is just about
power.

Who has it?

Who doesn't?

Who gets to
decide?

And why?

As we discussed earlier,
ideology, and therefore politics, is always present, whether we
recognize it or not.

Ignoring it doesn't
remove our responsibility; it contributes to the status quo, working
against the interests of the poorest and most vulnerable amongst us.

As Howard Zinn
says,

"you can't be neutral
on a moving train."

We must be conscious and
critical of our current economic and political structures - the
operating system, if you will. We must recognize that this system is
dependent on the misery and exploitation of other human beings.

The system is dependent
on the destructive extraction of fossil fuels that is irreversibly
devastating the only planet we have.

Its hunger for more - for
everything - is insatiable, which forces us to constantly work
more hours for additional 'growth' and 'wealth' that the majority of
us will never see.

These are not 'bugs' in
the system, to use coder language, but rather the core feature, the
very logic of the system itself. For every dollar of income created
in the US since 2008, 93 cents goes to the top 1%. 6

Therefore, growth creates
inequality from its inception.
Climate change is not manmade in
the traditional sense that we think about it - climate change is
capital made.

Every dollar of wealth
created heats up our planet because we have an extractives and
fossil fuel-based economy.

Capitalism turns natural
resources into commodities in order to attract and generate ever
more capital. It locks us into path dependency where we can never
take a risk of slowing growth.

We even subsidize
our own destruction by giving the ultimate agents and
benefactors of this production and consumption - corporations - more
subsidies and more power.

On
Neoliberalism

Although neoliberalism and capitalism are not the same thing, we can
accurately describe our current brand of global capitalism as
neoliberalism.

Neoliberalism is based on
three tenets.

First, it defines our
relationship to each other through a competitive lens (am I better,
richer, etc.?), which inevitably leads to ordering society through
rigid hierarchies. It equates material wealth with life success,
which is equated to virtue (e.g., rich people are good, poor people
are bad - i.e., re-interpreting poverty as a moral failing).

And it holds the
individual is the primary unit of power, an idea best captured by
Margaret Thatcher's famous quip that there is no such thing as
society, just individuals and families.

From an economic point of view, neoliberalism advocates the bankrupt
policy of trickle-down economics, the concentration of wealth in
private hands through explicit subsidization of corporations.

This directly leads to
the extraction of wealth from the poor to the rich. Since our jobs
and our identities are offshoots of this system, we are incapable of
breaking free of the logic. We have all had to create our own
stories in order to cope within the system.

People at the World Bank
or USAID or the Gates Foundation think they're helping the poor (and
at a micro-level maybe they are) and people in ad agencies think
they're being creative (and at a micro level maybe they are), but
they are, in fact, ensuring that the murky waters of the status quo
stay toxic.

What Hannah Arendt
once called the banality of evil has transmuted into the
banality of good.

We are told that people of merit rise to the top of the system. But
as John Ralston Saul argues, the system finds the people that
are best constructed to further its own existence and draws them to
the places they can best further the system. 7

Since the very lifeblood
of modern capitalism is the energy derived from material
consumption, it is inevitable that those who single-mindedly and
'successfully' desire, adore, and glorify consumption to the point
of gluttony will fit neatly and effortlessly into the seats of
power.

Operating successfully or even moderately well in this system makes
us transactional beings who reduce each other's vital humanity to
tools by which we value-maximize short-term profit.

We are quick to point out
the misery accumulated by communism or fascism. But capitalism,
especially neoliberal capitalism, is a form of distributed fascism.
What a few despotic elites once did to a massive population, most do
to each other now, in the hopes of accumulating more wealth, status
and hedonistic pleasure.

This is our background condition, the ubiquitous backdrop for all of
our lives.

If we want to reconnect
with spiritual truths, the first essential challenge is to
disconnect just enough from the economic machinery and its incessant
propaganda to recognize neoliberalism for what it is and what it
does to us.

How else can our
political organizing have the power and to know the importance of
our spiritual wisdom?

On Solutions

We tend to assume that progress is guaranteed, that human
ingenuity will beget the necessary solutions at just the right time.

We will find a technological innovation to mitigate climate change.
We will create enough economic growth to 'lift all boats' from the
stagnant harbor of poverty.

But if we look at the arc
of history from its beginning, the dominant mode is extinction
and collapse of species and civilizations. As
evolutionary anthropologists remind us, 99% of every species that
has ever existed is now extinct.

So what must be done?

Depending on one's
ideology, we are given three types of answers or, more accurately,
three levels of answers.

The traditional
answer of the Left, especially Marxists, has been to change
the superstructure - the generative rules that create our
material conditions.

The second has
been suggested by anarchists, communitarians, libertarians,
and ironically, by many institutional religions that believe
we should focus on the community level. They ask, how do we
create the support structures for those around us?

The last level
has often been suggested by spiritual teachers and mystics
who have simply said, 'go within.' All you have control over
is yourself, and since the entire universe is within you,
that is the primary unit of change.

The truth is that we need
to create change at all three levels simultaneously, and given the
state of climate change and the destruction of the biosphere, we
must operate at a rate that creates interdependent, positive
feedback loops.

If we simply try to
change the superstructure, we will spend our precious resources in
an inefficient battle with
well-funded tyrants (they do print
money in private mints after all).

This war of attrition
will frustrate, criminalize, and dishearten us, will lead to
burnout, and worse, we will miss the infinite moments of opportunity
that surround us.

We will not have
shared values that bind us together, as the atheistic
Left has painfully found out.

Nor will we have
the type of conscious individual that is truly required for
anarchist, autonomous, sustainable societies to truly exist.

If we only focus at the
community level, we risk contributing to the banality of good and
ensuring that the status quo stays in place.

We will only create
temporary bubbles of moral superiority while our species and fellow
planetary co-inhabitants are forced into extinction all around us.

And if we only focus on ourselves, we forget the most important
lesson of human nature.

We are who we are through
others. Beyond the quantum truth of this, highlighted by Einstein
when he said that the idea of the separate self is just "a
kind of optical delusion of consciousness," there is also the
sociological truth of our entanglement. 8

We are inherently social
creatures.

As the old motto of the
American abolitionists goes,

"none of us are free
until all of us are free."

Spiritual narcissism will
not save us. In fact, the gilded threads of self-evolution negate
purpose before the meditation starts.

Many people on the spiritual path believe that they need to achieve
a certain level of material wealth or spiritual enlightenment before
they start to contribute to the broader world. But we often forget
that the very acts of altruism, empathy, community, and solidarity
create our happiness and, therefore, our enlightenment.

They are not ontological
states to be punted to a future self.

The actions define who we
are and even how we see ourselves. We now know from behavioral
psychology that we always act first and then retroactively
create our identities from the fabric of those actions.

We are tomorrow what we
do today.

On Revolution

All of the collapses we are seeing,

the destruction
of the planet, mass resource depletion ('peak everything' as
it has been called)

the war on women
and girls

the increasing
financial boom and bust cycles

violence with no
end

skyrocketing
inequality

even the
spiritual ennui and existential angst that characterize
modernity,

...are not separate,
discrete issues.

They are interdependent
and interwoven. Ours is a temporary society built on the quicksand
of fossil fuels, human misery, and the destruction of our biosphere.

For true emancipatory social change to happen, a new type
of society must be created. New relationships must be forged. A
new consciousness must be born.

This change will require
revolution at all three levels simultaneously.

At one level, it's as simple as choosing a better story. We have
taken one book off one shelf in the library of ideas. The first
sentences in the story of capitalism were uttered barely 250 years
ago, at a time when we knew so much less about how human nature
really works. And like any profound beginning, we had no earthly
concept of how the story would unfold.

A lot of the common sense
'conventional wisdom' that has built up has proven to be incorrect.
We're only as selfish or as generous as we allow ourselves to be.

In The Original
Affluent Society, anthropologist Marshal Salins showed
how hunter-gatherers worked less than us, were highly cooperative
and egalitarian, and even consumed more calories per day than modern
humans.

Thomas Hobbes had
it wrong - we don't have to fight and struggle to survive.

We must tell new stories and forge new relationships that make the
old story of neoliberal capitalism obsolete. We must choose to be
the autoimmune response of the planet, the white blood cells of
humanity that cluster together at points of infection and begin the
healing.

The first decision must
be made within. We must all decide what role we want to enact. Then
we must set our own intentions and look to activate those around us.

This does not have to be by political means only.

Accessing
non-ordinary states through
meditation or yoga or psychedelics can
be beneficial avenues to break from the spell of the dominant Matrix
ideology. 9

Until we can become free
thinkers once more, how will we gain the independence to break the
cycle of complicity?

As Hakim Bey
poetically states,

"The only true
conflict is that between the authority of the tyrant and the
authority of the realized self - all else is illusion,
psychological projection, wasted verbiage…

Only the uprising
against the false consciousness in both ourselves and others
will sweep away the technology of oppression and the poverty of
the Spectacle." 10

After embodying this
realized self, the second stage is to organize among family,
friends, and the community around us with the aim of liberation and
delegitimizing the logic of the operating system in any way
possible.

We can refuse to
participate in ways small and large,

mobilizing on the
streets

organizing debt
resistance

creating
alternative currencies

buying locally

living off the
grid, etc.

Whatever the avenue for
radical change, all that matters is that,

we do it
consciously and with clear intention

we understand the
structure of the power we are facing

we are aware how
it is affecting us spiritually

we incorporate
these lessons into both our collective and self-evolution

we build with the
communities around us

Many of us will choose to
create alternative communities to live in.

These are growing all
around the world including,

the Zapatistas in
Chiapas, Mexico

El Alto in
Bolivia

the Transition
Town movement that started in the United Kingdom

even Burning Man,
the temporary utopian community in Black Rock City, Nevada

All of these can create
containers or even just sparks for the new consciousness.

As we explore and experiment with these new autonomous,
self-sustaining, self-organized communities, we will chose the
alternatives that make the most sense for us, our communities, our
geographies, and our historical contexts.

Creating new stories and
the infrastructure to carry the utopian seeds for the New Earth will
allow us not only to materially protect our species from a
dramatically changing climate, but will allow us to live in
spiritual accordance with our values.

Dieter Duhm
confidently reminds us that this,

"concrete utopia is a
latent reality within the universe, just as the butterfly is a
reality latent within the caterpillar. It lies in the structure
of our physical and biological world, in our genes, and in our
deeper ethical orientation." 11

Perhaps this process will
be a part of our spiritual ascension.

It could be that the
collapse of neoliberal capitalism and the healing of our planet and
species from the grips of destructive growth, greed, and
self-annihilation is a planetary initiatory process that will
catalyze the human species to evolve.

This will require a new
type of politics and a new type of spirituality.

We need activists
motivated by social justice and empathy but with the sense of wonder
and self-confidence of a mystic - the balance that comes from a deep
spiritual practice and grounding.

Those who can break
through the prison walls of Cartesian dualism and find the magic and
mystery in our collective struggle.

Those people who can
create what the Russian novelist Chyngyz Aitamtov calls the
'divine spark,' a resonance that has both love and power to operate
at all three levels,

the self

the community

the super
structure,

...simultaneously.

When I started to intellectually bridge the realms of mysticism and
anarchism, I did not think I would end up in this place, that the
resulting exploration would have the potential to be so liberating
yet so daunting.

I immediately went back
to my mother's faith in the magic of the unknown, her confidence
that every atom was the embodiment of God, and her totalizing
ability to trust in a wisdom greater than our own.

I can leave you with no
better words than those of Guillaume Apollinaire that she
read to me all those years ago:

"Come to the edge, he said.

They said: We are afraid.

Come to the edge, he said.

They came.

He pushed them and they flew."

References

1. I would argue that
the Right values the rhetoric, not the substance of freedom.
They have captured the language and made it mean property
rights; however, the two are not synonymous except in their
dictionary meaning. Property rights are a freedom only in the
sense that slavery was a freedom; i.e., for the slave-owners to
own slaves. If you want to use the rhetorical definition that
"because it lets me do what I want" as the definition, then
murder could be called freedom, and even genocide could be
defended with this line of illogic. In fact, one could say that
the Right's love of the rhetoric is matched only by their hatred
of the actual ideal.

2. Of course, the
Right, especially in America, has ridden the wave of false
spirituality to a huge degree. You can't be President -
Republican or Democrat - if you don't conjure up illusory images
of a white, bearded, savior God. So it's not that we don't hear
the language of gods and morality and other spiritual concepts,
it's that we've packaged up the ideas into simplistic esoteric
dogma that is meaningless - the antithesis of spirituality. True
spirituality starts with humility and heads off into the wilds
of wonder and ignorance. It doesn't set judgmental rules and
regulations by which to judge others first and yourself never.